YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Dark

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30
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2015-05-04
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2015-05-04
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1
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  1. “Like I did too earlier, I guess it was investing in my own money in C2FO. And why I said yes? Well, because I believe in what we're doing. So other investments I do are very boring. Like, you know, do I have FTSE 100 or something else? Not the most exciting. So I'd say investing in C2F05.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think. I think probably to date would be the investment I most liked doing was Supercell. Brilliant company. Has done fantastically, the people are wonderful. They're all wonderful. And just genuinely passionate about gaming, which I am too my past. So that just kind of felt like everything was just right. And actually, you know, it's done brilliantly well. So I think probably that.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Think they want to be a founder, but they don't really. What they actually want to be is kind of the fifth, sixth employee have a little bit of infrastructure around them and work in a kind of fast-paced startup. Very few people really want to be the first person that gets something going because it's phenomenally difficult. And actually, if you're not sure about that, get some education because you can fall back on it. But if you know you want to be that person that starts it from scratch, then go for it because you know what? There's no time in the present. And when you're 20 years old, who cares if you fail? It should be a badge of honor, which increasingly it is becoming outside of the US. And the US has always been very good at that.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's absolutely up to the individual. There are some brilliant founders. Look, let's take Zuckerberg. I mean, big businesses, $200 billion businesses dropping out. It's not a problem. But it's not right for everyone. A lot of people...”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “But, you know, having said that when I was doing that, I was building my own business. I think it's a good thing to get, but look, and Peter Feels, one of our investors, and I know obviously very famously he's got his fund for people that are the college dropouts.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Oh, Bitcoin, I'm very long Bitcoin, so I have a bunch of Bitcoins. Not because I trade them or anything. It's just like, well, The bitcoins are relevant, right? What matters is the blockchain and how ultimately you're using a whole, it's a different way of authorizing things. And so that's actually the key thing. And also moving money around the world is so stupid with the banking system and how many banks are involved and with whether it's Bitcoin or Stella or whatever that will fundamentally change remittance around the world. And that's half a trillion dollar industry or so that alone absolutely will solve.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, so now it's really for us it's about global domination. And it's very much a, you know, we have suppliers already in over 60 countries. So working capital is a global problem. Banking is screwed globally. And actually it's least screwed in many ways in the US and UK, I would say. So yeah, I think it's really just expanding, keeping a very focused product.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, but that's part of the game, right? Look, you can, as a VC, you can have, some have very, one of our investors is Union Square Ventures, right? They're very well known for investing in network effect businesses, network of engaged users. They're famous for it. And so for them, they're going to understand timing of network effect businesses better than most. Why? Because they just have more experience. So I think that's important. And you know what? Some of the great VCs just got lucky. And if you put the first money into Google and you know what, some people get lucky. And then because then it's a virtuous circle, because you've been in certain deals, you get into other deals.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “People talk now about, well, not just crowdfunding, but crowdsourcing for work. We were doing that in 02 when no one had really talked about it. So maybe I should have realized that and started a different business model.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Wouldn't have worked three years later, would have been too late. So timing is crucial. So, what I had to work out is how do I create a lot of content in an incredibly cheap manner? Because I can't afford to pay people. So I had 400 people working, not really working, but just volunteers around the world, each of them produced maybe one article a week. Maybe so they were putting a few percent of their time into game replays. But in aggregate, that meant I actually got quite a lot of content of good quality. And they were passionate about games. So what I realized is you've got to use people's passion and you can get a lot from people. And they, you know, to be honest, the site is not like it was printing money. I mean, it just about broke even in reality. So you've got to find that whatever it might be, that kind of little button that you compress that gets people excited, motivated. And this was in effect early.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Timing is just absolutely crucial. I mean, it's pretty simple. Lets you Skype is a great example. Why did Skype work? Well, it wasn't the first VoIP service. I didn't call it VoIP. It was Freedlephony, but it wasn't the first. It worked really well, which was a big plus. Some of them didn't work. But it was because of broadband penetration. They just hit that curve when it started to go crazy, grow crazy fast. And if they'd done it two years earlier,”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, for me, it was like for that, it was never going to be a big business because at the time, well, actually, Twitch now got over a billion. In effect, we were that for 10 years ago. In fact, a lot of the people that worked on my site now work at Twitch.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “With Lao Tau, like, well, you know, it had some horrendous days, but he made it, he got to a decent exit and companies where he'd been an investor, which we worked with. And entrepreneurs respect that. They respect when things get tough, when they're going to get tough, the tough get going. Because when it's all going well, it's easy. And honestly, some investors, and again, I'm not going to name names, but when the tough get going, they start looking at the legal docs and how they can screw the company and the founders. That's not cool. And no great investor does that in the long run.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Not many of them, and I would, I'm going to give an answer which you aren't expecting, which is the people you want around are the people when the going gets tough. They stick around, they support you, and they help you get through. Because if every curve of your, if every KPI you have is going up to the right, Everyone's very happy, and it's all great. But what really distinguishes, I think, the best investors is, you know what? If you read the hard thing about hard things, Ben Horitz.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Amazing. And he's wonderful to listen to in board meetings and he's super duper smart. So yes, if you have people like that, that can massively, but you know what? That's slightly true.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So look, I worked on the border companies with people like Reed Hoffman, who founded PayPal, LinkedIn. Brilliant product guy.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Any decent VC gets it, that that is a very fair request. And also, it's very rare that the VC is going to go and do something that takes an individual in that firm three weeks of solid work, right? I mean, they're probably going to make an introduction to someone they know. It takes five minutes. So it's not particularly much to ask for.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “If that's good, please show your worth. And so, this is how I always went about when I was an investor talking to entrepreneurs. I would make slides for them. I would say, hey, here's our plan. By the way, let's get going tomorrow. And they looked at me like I was crazy. I'm like, well, we don't need to invest help. And to this day, that's how Atomico does things. It's how a lot of the great VCs do do things. And if someone's not willing to, well, how you're about to get married to them, as you say. I just think it's the simplest test in the world and it's very quick, you know, the bullshitometer, whatever you want to call it, you can very quickly see people that are just kind of not being particularly truthful.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, there's a really simple tell, and it's the simplest thing in the universe. Everyone's going to tell you, every investor is going to tell you how helpful they're going to be. They're going to introduce you to everyone in the world that you want to meet and blah, blah, blah, blah.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It absolutely is. And you, you know, so that's very important. And again, people get very caught up on, oh, well, you know, I'm raising at 40 million. Maybe I think it should be 50. And actually, if you actually go and work out the difference to your ownership as a founder in those scenarios, it's very, very little. It's much more important having the right people around the table.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Especially in the UK. But if people aren't moving and there's not obvious next steps, then they're not interested. And a lot of entrepreneurs misread that. They think they are interested because they haven't said no. But you know what? Whilst I always try to tell people no when I knew it was no, I wanted to be honest, a lot of people don't. So that's one thing to watch out for. Now, if you have traction and you're trying to raise wherever it be series A, B, C, whatever, well, if you're raising around later than that, you probably know what you're doing, then again. The things I found, people obsess too much about valuation. What's much more important is can you work with the people who are probably going to be joining your board? And you're going to have to work with them for maybe the next eight years. It's a long time.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so, okay, the first thing, of course, is it depends on what stage we're talking about. So if you're looking to raise your very first kind of external money, you may have cobbled together 50K, friends and family, you know, that type of thing, you're wanting to raise maybe half a million seed drowns, then really it's just about, you just need to find one person that will write any size of check. 200,000, 400,000. Just get someone that's willing to put in 50K. Because as soon as you have one person, you will get the other angels because one person just has to move and commit. What you see sometimes is just paralysis. Everyone's waiting for someone else to move. So that's probably good. And if someone just keeps telling you it's interesting, that is, of course, the word of death. Interesting means they're not interested.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yes, correct. And then absolutely. And at that time, who's my boss, our CEO founder? And we just kind of clicked. It was kind of simple in the end. But at the time, it was a huge decision.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “As I said, I fell in love with it, and I did probably the strongest thing you can do, which is I went to, I joined it, joined the company and I invested as well.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Read certain well known tech blogs, which everyone knows which I'm talking about, and it sort of does sound achievement, but it's not. So we have... The investors of the public and investors that are not, who are, by the way, as good as you can get in the world, we just don't, we don't think it's news trumpeting when we raise money. We're just building a great business. So, yes, I have been on both sides of the table. Obviously many, many, many hundreds or thousands of people were pitching to me and I probably ended up doing, I don't know, 20, 25 investments. And obviously I've been on the other side too. And I think what's really interesting is when you've been on both sides, you can be talking in a way that I know the kind of VC, how they're thinking. I think it makes it quite. And you can, and also my story is simple. I did a lot of work looking at C2FO.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I wasn't there then, but we've raised money since. We just don't talk about it because we're sort of old school in that a lot of people think raising money is the achievement. And it's not. It's the beginning.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Do I want to stay or do I want to go? Spoke to obviously everyone a lot. Ultimately, just thought, you know what, at a brilliant time here, they're doing a great job. I just want to get to building something again. And I was literally going into a role where, so I basically run the business outside of North America. So I was starting from basically nothing. Although I had, of course, infrastructure in the US, which is quite nice and a product.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Money banks due to the Basel III and different regulations. At the same time, having many tens of trillions of dollars of cash sitting on corporate balance sheets earning nothing and actually now negative returns in the bank. And then I sort of realized that with C2FO, you can actually solve this entire problem. And I just sort of decided it was one of the big three problems of the world was, I mean, I've got no justification for this, but 60% of global GDP is SMEs. Yeah, most of them will tell you how difficult it is to get financing to grow their business. So that's a pretty super big problem. Absolutely. And so by C2FO, by using the cash from the balance sheets of big corporates to accelerate their accounts payable, what they owe to their suppliers, this is a really neat way of solving that. So I just fell in love with it and I wrestled for two or three months about, you know,”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Sure. So, as you know, you can probably tell, my mind has always been, it's always a tug of war in my mind about doing entrepreneurial operational stuff and kind of, you know, investing stuff. And so it was pretty simple at the end of the day is that I completely fell in love with C2FO as a company. I was thinking through some of the core problems the world has at the moment, very obvious ones like small businesses finding it very difficult to raise”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think there's two answers. One is this, if you're young and you've worked two, three years in a bank or a consultancy or whatever it might be, or Google or whatever. And you want to go and just experience working with a whole bunch of different high energy startups and you come in with a good attitude that you don't know everything and you're there to learn and you're going to have to do a lot of analysis. That's a good reason. Just to get broader experience. And then really the only other type of person that joins is someone that's probably being quite successful in doing some form of entrepreneurial thing before building a company or whatever it might be. And then you're going in as a very different role where you're really trying to use your experience to genuinely help the portfolio companies that you have. So I think they're kind of two main reasons. I think some people just think it's, frankly they're in a bank and banking's pretty tough these days and they sort of just want to get out.”

    2015-05-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 033: The Pros and Cons of Venture Capital, Atomico and Entrepreneurship with Chris Dark, President International @ C2FO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source